The Detective and Mr. Dickens (39 page)

Inspector Field sensed him there, in the darkness, the briefest of moments before Ashbee leapt. Ashbee attacked Field from above, launching himself from a small porch, four stone steps above the level of the alley. Somehow, by some instinctive sense learned in a lifetime of risk, Field knew to put up his arms and drop to his knees to absorb the attack. Nevertheless, Ashbee knocked Field upon his face on the stones of the alleyway.

Ashbee gripped a heavy curbing stone in both of his hands as he sprawled across Field’s back. He had hoped to crush his pursuer’s head with one blow even as he completed his downward leap. But Field’s instinctive ducking to the ground had caused the attacker to miss with his well-planned blow. The stone, however, was still grasped tight in his hands, and his victim still lay, momentarily stunned, beneath him. Ashbee raised the heavy stone to dash it down. Again, Field’s uncanny impulse for self-preservation asserted itself. He rolled sharply away. That sudden move saved Field’s life, for that heavy stone would surely have crushed his skull. He rolled suddenly enough to save his head, but the blow pounded down upon his shoulder drawing forth a cry of pain.

At that anguished cry, Dickens’s concentration upon the stricken girl was broken. He knew it was Field. It was not so much a recognition of Field’s sound, as a knowing that Field was hurt and in trouble. Gently, Dickens lay the girl’s head down upon her cloak, jumped to his feet and plunged heedlessly into the black alley.

Ashbee was not done. He rose to his feet, both hands still grasping the murderous stone. He loomed over his crippled pursuer. Once again, he raised the stone with both hands over his head to crush out Field’s life.

To Dickens, they were but shadows against the deeper dark of the night. A monstrous shadow looming above a small pool of shadow. Running full tilt, gathering all the power his body could muster, Dickens drove low into the backs of that looming shadow’s knees. In the silence of that black alley, Dickens imagined that he could hear the crack of bones splitting and the rip of sinews tearing. Ashbee was driven, face forward, to the cobbled ground. His murderous stone careened harmlessly out into the darkness, to crash against the base of the building. Dickens landed atop him and rolled away. But Milord Ashbee did not rise. He thrashed once, then twice, then lay still, his legs splayed out at a grotesque angle.

“Bravo Dickens!” Inspector Field shouted as he struggled to his feet. “Would ’ave crushed me ’ead like a melon if you ’adn’t ’it ’im!”

“Is everythin’ square, mates?” Thompson straggled up.

“I think me arm is broke,” Field’s voice was tight with pain.

Thompson moved to Ashbee who lay groaning upon the cobblestones.

“My leg, the fool has broken my leg,” Milord spat, in a tone composed half of a whine and half of a curse.

“If you two was ’orses, we’d shoot the both of ye,” the incorrigible Thompson laughed.

Dickens saw no need to tarry at Field’s aid any longer. At a run he retraced his steps to attend to his beloved Ellen. When he reached the mouth of the alleyway, the girl was gone.

A Hole in the Water

May 11, 1851—midnight

When Dickens returned to find the young girl gone, what thoughts must have whirled within his troubled imagination? As he stood alone, eyes searching for some glimpse of her, yet seeing only fog and dark and the impenetrable faces of stone tenements, his imagination must have taken charge. He must have seen her, muffled in her cloak, running, frightened, alone, fleeing the brutal men who had used her. He must have sensed her reaching out longingly for death, for deliverance. In his imagination he must have seen them all, Nell, Nancy—his own little Dora, Ellen, all of the lost children of his heart—as they fled, in the fog and the rain, from the brutality of men.

I had noticed, since the death of his small daughter, that Dickens had come to rely more upon his inward vision than upon the clear facts that reality places before us. It was as if by the power of his imagination he felt he could transform reality into something less ugly and threatening and…final. Perhaps he thought that, through the power of his imagination, he could bring his daughter back; perhaps that is where his love for Ellen began. More and more, he chose to bring his inward eye, his imagination, to bear upon problems which seemed to demand the powers of deductive reason, the powers of Inspector Field’s profession. He seemed to be in a trance, yet he was seeing.

“The girl, where is she?” Inspector Field asked, breaking Dickens’s reverie.

“The river,” Dickens murmured. “My God, the river.”

Field’s face was twisted with the pain of his injured arm; yet, at Dickens’s words, his whole carriage seemed to straighten. “She is drugged, not ’erself.” Field was like some thinking machine, processing information, distributing it. “She’ll make for the bridge. There are stairs to the water below, or she may go up on the bridge itself.”

No sooner had Field spoken than Dickens was gone. Thompson arrived from one direction, I from the other. Dickens, at a flat run, plunged into the fog in the direction of the stinking Thames.

“Go after ’im,” Field shouted, through his pain. “All is secure ’ere.”

Thompson and myself did as we were bid. It seemed as if the sum of this long evening had consisted of the chasing of phantoms in the fog. Perhaps we knew—I don’t remember, because all was happening so fast—that the Ternan girl was out there, ahead of Dickens, fleeing from the one man whose only desire was to help her. As I look back upon it now, the cynicism of the intervening years challenges my last sentence. Who is to know what desires Dickens harbored within his heart? We chased after him blindly. He pursued her. She wandered in a hopeless dream. The fog swallowed them up. The river flowed before us…waiting.

Dickens admitted to me, later, that he had no idea where he was going that night. The fog was so thick, and the visibility so poor, that each of his choices, of which turning to take in the maze, was made on pure instinct. He picked his way through that labyrinth of waterside streets. He did not need his eyes because the eyes of his mind knew every turning.

Dickens raced down a filthy alley, then crossed a darkened street between mean buildings. He ducked into another narrow passageway. There, he found her hooded cloak discarded upon the stones. He picked it up, cast it aside, continued on.

Before him, he could hear the river. The tide was coming in, and it broke with a violent slap against the pilings of the bridge and the stone seawalls. The river was close. With a rush, he burst out of that labyrinth of dark, low-lying streets, and came upon wide stairs beneath Chelsea Bridge. Its fog-haloed lights glowed palely in the night, burned dim in a fragile line, up and out to where they finally disappeared into that sea of fog. She was up there in her scarlet dress. He could catch brief glimpses of her as she moved between the gaslamps of the bridge. She was circling, it seemed—not progressing out upon the bridge, but moving aimlessly back and forth. As Dickens screamed her name, and broke into a run for the narrow stairs climbing up the walkway of the bridge, her movements lost their aimlessness.

“Ellen,” Dickens screamed. “Stop! Wait for me!” It was a plea.

Thompson and I broke out of the dark maze of tenement-walled streets onto the embankment. Dickens was running frantically toward the bridge.

His cries for her to stop, to wait, were to no avail. She was mounting the railing beneath one of the gas-lit parapets.

“Ellen, no! Please!” it was a scream of helpless anguish.

For one brief second, poised on that bridge railing, his scream vibrating in the night air over the river, she froze, her eyes burning down upon him, as he ran toward her, far below. He stopped running, as if turned to stone by her gaze. Their eyes met for one long second, at the end of which she tentatively stretched her hand out toward him. But her arm dropped limply to her side, and, the next moment, she flung herself from the bridge.

Dickens, it seemed to me, was in motion before she ever made that move to throw herself from the railing. He was sprinting at full speed back in the direction of Thompson and myself, who were standing at the top of the wide, stone boatmen’s stairs.

She floated slowly down, it seemed, as if time had slowed, and she was but easing herself into the black current. She floated slowly down, her scarlet dress billowing out around her, catching the swirling river wind, seeming to buoy her up upon the air and break her plummet to the river below. She floated slowly down, as we watched in horror.

“My God, she jumped,” I uttered, stupidly.

“Stupid bitch!” Thompson cursed. “We’re in for it now.”

Dickens dashed past us without a word. I don’t believe he even knew that we were there. He leapt down the boatmen’s steps, shedding his greatcoat as he went, and launched himself in a long flat dive out into the black water of the Thames.

What was so amazing was the absolute fluidity of his act. He never hesitated. The run along the embankment, the descent of the stair, the dive, were all one decisive act of love and imagination.

Thompson was down the steps at a bound, but was much cooler in his assessment of the realities of the situation. He stopped at the bottom to pull off his boots and discard his greatcoat. He marked the woman in the red dress floating on the surface of the tide, the splashes of Dickens swimming toward her, the speed of the current. That information assimilated, he, too, dove into the river, but not in the direction of the two swimmers. He came up swimming, at an angle well downstream of Dickens and the insensible girl. He was going to let the tide bring them to him.

Throughout our long acquaintance, I have always marvelled at the quick and analytical intelligence of Tally Ho Thompson. He seems the very loosest of beings, and yet, when one observes, one realizes that there is no wasted motion in anything that the man does. He is, indeed, a marvel!

As I watched this drama unfold before me on this watery stage, I was further amazed at the strength and stamina of Charles, as he swam to the aid of his suicidal love. He reached her before the water inundated her billowing gown, and bore her to the bottom of the river. They seemed to briefly struggle, but he later explained that the girl was unconscious, and he was merely wrestling her out of her scarlet dress, which, in its waterlogged state, threatened to pull them both down. He managed to strip the dress away, but the current was too strong, and he could not swim with her in tow.

By this time, however, the river had carried them into the grasp of Tally Ho Thompson. No one must have been more surprised than Dickens when, in mid-river, Thompson tapped him on the shoulder and said, “’Ullo mate, can I be of any assistance?” or something equally as comical. The two men arranged themselves on each side of the stricken girl, and, kicking furiously, made for the shore.

But the current was strong, and the tide almost at the turn. They were being rapidly carried away.

“Come, we must run and catch ’em at that first pier,” a voice thundered in my ear. Inspector Field and the revivified Serjeant Rogers had joined me on the stair.

At that order from Field, Rogers set out at a limping run along the embankment. I could not allow that arrogant little bureaucrat to outdo me.

Our headlong dash had the object of reaching a point on the river bank where we might intercept the swimmers, and pluck them from that powerful current. Our only hope was a narrow shipping pier, which extended out into the river. By the time we reached that rickety wooden catwalk, both Rogers and myself were fully blown, and the swimmers were closing fast upon us.

We moved gingerly out upon the rotting pier. It was clear that we must climb down beneath the rickety flooring to the waterline in order to have any chance at hooking Dickens and Thompson, who must certainly have been nearing exhaustion. We managed to swing ourselves down and into position, each standing on a crossbeam nailed between the pilings of the pier. Our shoes were no more than six inches above the rushing current.

“Take me arm an ’old tight,” Serjeant Rogers barked.

I hated taking orders from that pompous martinet, but I grabbed a tight handful of his greatcoat, and wrapped my other arm, as far as it would go, around the moldy piling of the pier.

Rogers leaned out as far as he could without toppling off into the rushing water.

We could see the three swimmers bobbing erratically along in the current, heading directly toward our precarious perch, yet bouncing and swerving in their struggles to stay afloat. They were moving too fast. Rogers would have one chance—and one only—to grasp them.

We waited. He leaned further, lower, utterly dependent upon my grip and strength.

Our targets careened toward us on the tide.

Rogers reached. He lunged desperately, almost pulling us both into the river. Somehow I held on, my arm compressing around that piling.

He did it. Rogers came up with a firm grasp on Dickens’s foot. He dragged that foot up under the crossbeam upon which we stood and Dickens’s free arm clasped the wood. Soon Thompson, as well, was hanging by one arm, and gasping for breath. Their charge, ghostly white, insensible, hung between them, naked, hair plastered to her scalp, feet dangling in the race.

Within moments, Inspector Field and two constables had come to our assistance. Carefully, we passed Miss Ternan up. Field covered her nakedness with his greatcoat. They rushed her to our waiting coach. Dickens scrambled up next, shouting the whole time, even while gasping for breath, that he must ride with the unconscious girl to hospital.